Search on blogs is a relatively simple concept. You type in a few keywords related to a post and results are presented to you that are local to that blog. However, what if you could extend the functionality of the search function to go beyond your blog to cover the videos you have published on YouTube, your Twitter account, bookmarks, network of friends, and the blogs you read in your RSS reader? That’s exactly what  Lijit enables you to do.

Company Info:

Lijit is based out of Boulder, CO which is a surprise to many considering silicon valley is typically the home for most Internet based businesses. Using the power of people, their content, and their connections, Lijit aims to enhance the way your readers search for and discover information on the Internet. You serve as a filter for all of the results your readers could possibly receive, ensuring they only receive the most relevant results from the source they trust. That source being you.

Signing Up And Configuration:

Before we get things underway, be prepared to spend 15-30 minutes to not only create an account but also to configure the search widget. The first thing you’ll need to do is submit your blogs URL. Once you provide the URL, the next configuration page has a list of services that are grouped by purpose. For each site/service that you have an account with, you’ll need to tell Lijit what your user name is for that service. If you have an account with a site that is not listed, Lijit does provide an option for you to provide a link to a URL, RSS, or OPML feed which will be added into the search results.

Once that is done, the next page is all about adding your network to your  account. This network consists of your MyBlogLog account, the blogs you read, your blogroll, del.icio.us, Lijit users etc. This extended network is also added to your Lijit search engine.

The third configuration page is where you get to create your user account. After you create your account, Lijit will take all of the information you provided and mash it all together into a personalized search engine. After your search engine is created, you’ll have a chance to configure the look and feel of the search widget so it looks good within your blog theme. Customization options include choosing widget styles, color palettes, logo colors, choosing what is displayed such as content icons or popular searches within a cloud and re-search.

Re-search is described by Lijit as:

When a search brings someone to your blog, Lijit’s Re-Search feature takes the query they used, re-performs that search through your Lijit search engine (hence the name “Re-Search”), and shows the top few results in a special display on your blog. You can pick the display location — either at the top of your blog or just above your Lijit Search Wijit.

On your stats page, Lijit shows the number of times Re-Search has been displayed in the “Number of Searches” bar graph and in the “Stats Summary” box. (Note that if you have Re-Search disabled, we’ll still show the data, but label it as “potential Re-Searches” so you can see what you missed!)

Installing The Widget:

Lijit supports TypePad and WordsPress out of the box. For sites such as Tumblr, LiveJournal, etc, there is a piece of javascript that can be used to install the widget on your blog. Considering my personal blog is WordPress based, you know which I one I chose. Lijit provides a WordPress plugin which is installed like any other plugin. Simply unzip the file, upload it to your WordPress plugin directory and activate it. Then guess what. You have to log into your WordPress administration panel and perform some more configuration options.

Thankfully, configuring the widget is a pretty simple process. One of the cool features of the plugin is that, you can choose to either use the standard Lijit Widget which appears in your blogs sidebar or you can substitute the WordPress search function with the Lijit search.

Service In Use:

After all is said and done, take a look at your blogs front page and perform a search via the Lijit search box. A Light-box style window should pop up which displays the results. It’s pretty easy to see how Lijit is monetizing the service as they have ads served by Google on the right hand side as well as above the search results.

The search result window provides at least four different tabs from which to perform a search query. By default, the blog url is searched. However, users can choose to search via your content, network, or the web itself. Of course, if people were going to search the web, I’d think they would do that from the Google Homepage.

After performing a few test search queries, I found the search results to be pretty accurate. One of the cooler features found within the search results is that, there is a link underneath each result that is labeled “What’s The Connection“. Upon clicking on the link, you’ll see how the result is connected to the search engine. A great feature to have, especially when visitors are performing searches through the Content or Network tabs.

If you feel unsatisfied with the results that Lijit provides, there is a link at the bottom of the page which takes you to the their feedback page. The topic is automatically filled in with what you were searching for enabling the team to focus their efforts on that specific search query for your domain.

Stats:

One nice thing about Lijit that the default WordPress search bar doesn’t do is give you statistics. Lijit provides an entire area for statistics that is tied to your account. You can track how many searches are performed on your blog, the keywords that were searched, total searches, geographical location, page views, your exposure and much more.

In fact, the exposure tab actually notified me of people that were linking to me that I didn’t know about previous to using the service. Although in at least one case, Lijit picked up on some links that were old and when clicking on the pages that supposedly had a link to my blog, I received a 404 error.

Conclusion:

I’ve seen a number of big name blogs using Lijit for quite some time now, including this one. In my opinion, Lijit has two killer features wrapped in one. The first being control. End users are in control of what appears in their search engine which leads me to feature number two. The ability to create a personalized search engine that only taps into your blog content, but can be customized to search all of the content you have produced on other sites/services across the web. On top of that, you can then add blogs that you read and or trust to your search engine which is then used by your readers. Hopefully, other people have added your own blog to their personalized Lijit search as this all means there is a possibility of receiving traffic not only from Google, but from personalized Lijit search engines as well.

If there was one thing I don’t like about the service it would be the way in which search results are displayed. Instead of the search result shown in a window that seems like a popup, I would much rather have the results displayed as if they were natural to my blog. For instance, I’d love it if they provided a way for me to add a bit of code to my WordPress themes search result template page. Not sure how difficult that would be, but at least the results would look natural. Other than that, I can easily see why some of the biggest names in blogging are using Lijit.

Things To Look Forward To:

During the course of this review, I was able to get in touch with Micah Baldwin who is VP of Business Development and he gave me the lowdown on some things that Lijit is working on behind the scenes.

• additional content sources (that can be added to a publisher’s results);

• further control over look and feel of results (providing publishers more ways to integrate Lijit search results into their publications);

• some new “bling” to the results themselves (meaning more information attached to individual results, like thumbnails, etc);

• more ways for publishers to derive revenue from their search results;

• greater opportunities for advertisers to create relationships with the right publishers;

• continued measurement of the influence of publishers, and the ability to present that measurement to readers.

Basically, we are focused on: constantly making Lijit search results unique and representative of the publisher; increasing publisher pageviews and reader engagement; and optimizing the ability of publishers to generate revenue from a forgotten or under- monetized area of their publication.

The future looks bright for Lijit. Be sure to let me know in the comments if you currently use Lijit on your own blog and if you prefer it over the default search engine that comes with your publishing software of choice.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Is Your Blog Search Lijit [REVIEW]

As I read through the comments on that post and pondered it some more thoughts came to mind that I think are worth adding:

Test and Track Results

I’ve written numerous times on ProBlogger about testing and tweaking advertising on your blog (for example – this post on how to run Split Testing).

The same principle is true for running affiliate campaigns on a number of levels.

1. Split Testing Banner ads

If you do run banner ads to promote your affiliate campaign (do remember yesterday I said that they don’t tend to work as well as in post promotions) you can run some split testing in a similar way to the one mentioned in the Split Testing article. Instead of showing two different versions of AdSense ads – just show two different types of banner ads that promote the product you’re promoting. You just need to make sure you have a method of tracking which banner ad is converting best (many affiliate programs will either give different tracking ids or will track different banners for you).

2. Track What Your Readers Respond to

Yesterday I mentioned that instead of just promoting an affiliate product once that it can be worth running a series of different types of posts to promote it over time. The beauty in doing this is that you begin to see what your readership responds to. You might find that few people sign up for a product when you first announce it but when you write a review that sales increase. Alternatively you might find that when you offer a bonus they sign up more or even that they respond to you doing an interview with the person behind the product. The key is to try different things but then to watch how they convert.

Testing the conversions on affiliate programs seems so basic – but it amazes me just how many bloggers I see using affiliate programs who just seem to slap up a quick post saying to ‘buy this product’ and don’t seem to get creative in trying new methods of promotion.

3. Test different programs and their conversions

In yesterdays post Omar asked for a list of best affiliate programs. It’s a common question but one that is really impossible to answer because there are literally thousands of options open to bloggers and different programs will convert differently for different blogs. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, this partly depends upon the relevancy of products to your content and audience – but it also depends upon other factors including the sales copy of the landing page that you send traffic to (some pages will appeal to some audiences more than others), the profile and brand of the site you send traffic to, the price of the product etc.

The key when you’re in the affiliate marketing game is to experiment with different affiliate programs and products within them. You might find that a program like Amazon’s Associates program fits best for your audience (despite it’s lower commission rates than some others) because your audience is familiar with it, or you might find a program like PepperJam (which has a lot of great affiliates in the one network) is better suited to you or you might even establish a relationship with a smaller company who has their own private affiliate program because their product just ‘fits’ with your audience.

The key is to look for relevant products that fit your audience’s needs and then to track the conversions.

One more thing about Choosing Affiliate Programs

There are some great comments in the previous post about choosing affiliate programs – particularly from Lex G and Linda. They both pick up that it’s not always the highest paying affiliate program that is best. While it’s great to find a high priced program that pays out a high percentage commission – you might find that the price is out of the reach of the type of audience that you have and that another program that pays less commission and that is lower priced could actually earn you more.

A lot of people write off programs like Amazon’s Associates program because of their lower commissions and price points on items like books – however I’ve found that Amazon can work very well for me (it remains in my top ways to make money blogging at #4 on the list. While I don’t see the spectacular sales that some other programs can earn – the hundreds of smaller sales that I can see on any given day can certainly add up.

How Much Traffic Do You Need?

Dainis asked in the comments of the previous post how much traffic would be needed before starting to promote affiliate programs.

This is another good (and common) question – and as with many aspects of making money from blogs it is a question that different people will answer differently.

My personal approach is to start promoting these types of programs early. I’ve written a long post on when to put advertising on a blog previously and much of what I say there is also relevant to affiliate programs but my main reasons for starting early are:

• While you might not make much with just a little traffic you could make some.
• Starting early gets your readers used to the idea that you make money from your blog. Adding it later could put some offside.
• Learn how to monetize your blog before you have readers so you can make your mistakes in front of just a few rather than a lot of people.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Make Money With Affiliate Programs on Your Blog – More Thoughts